As Pride Week hits Toronto, we look at other gay-friendly fests, plus tell you about new security plans for screening passengers at airports.

This three-tiered system would have people separated by perceived risk level, and check them, with their bags, in motion as they walk through the little corridor. The system could be in place within seven years.

Pride Week is upon us, and for many who like dressing up, beer tents, crowds of well- and ill-advised toplessness, or if you’re just in from Otterville and the whole thing is just too exciting to miss, the Yonge and Church corridor is probably the place to be.

Otherwise, it’s a great time to be travelling. But travel for the same-sex-inclined is not as straightforward as finding the right beach with the right number of steps to the right bars and clubs. It’s easy to forget, especially around Pride, that there are places in the world that like us, places that will barely tolerate us, and places that won’t.

According to Quebec City’s Touristiquement Gay, these are the seven best bets for places where holding hands will not get you stared at for anything other than lust or envy.

Barcelona: Spain beat us to same-sex marriage by months; their beaches, though mostly man-made, beat us by much more.

Cape Town: South Africa was the first nation to explicitly incorporate same-sex rights into its constitution. That has, apparently, had its touristic effect.

Rio de Janeiro: This city’s traditionally thong-friendly beaches are now, according to Touristiquement Gay, also quite gay-friendly.

Puerta Vallarta: In same-sex travel circles, particularly the male ones, this old Love Boat port of call is the gay Mecca. The Zona Romantica is apparently the place to be.

Tel Aviv: Being the gayest spot in the Middle East is not saying much. According to reports, there is only one real gay bar here. But there’s a big Pride parade (in early June), and this secular centre of the holiest place on earth is, amenities aside, friendly enough to make most non-Palestinian gays comfortable.

Sydney: Melbourne’s the better city, I hear, but Sydney’s got the beaches.

Miami Beach: Miami is the only place in the U.S. where Cubans are in the majority. South Beach may be the only place in the U.S. where same-sexers are.

FUTURE SECURITY CHECKPOINT

The security checkpoint of the future, displayed at IATA’s recent annual general meeting in Singapore, could make things on the ground a good deal more pleasant. This system seeks out who people are, rather than what they’re carrying. A biometric device in every passport, when scanned, send us to one of three aisles, for known travellers, normal travellers and people about whom little enough is known that they need an enhanced check (the sort we’re all subject to now).

According to Ken Dunlap, IATA’s security director, about 30 per cent of travellers at a given airport will be in the “known” category, and 3-9 per cent will be directed to the enhanced lane. And though the system as displayed, with in-motion security checks meaning no one ever has to stop and wait, isn’t envisioned for at least seven years, according to Dunlap said things are already moving, with a trial for an early version of this system set for next year, and Europe requiring fingerprint checks by 2013.

Dunlap says the major obstacle to the development and implementation of this system is “government will,” but at the AGM, Akbar Al Baker, CEO of Qatar Airways, worried that “known travellers,” would make excellent targets for blackmail or other forms of terrorist coercion.

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